The shutdown chaos just keeps growing. Hundreds of flights have been canceled around the country today amid staffing shortages for air traffic controllers, who are currently going without pay. The Federal Aviation Administration said this morning that, by this time next week, they could be forced to ground as many as 10 percent of all daily flights. But the real meltdowns likely won’t come until the holiday travel boom—if the shutdown were to drag on that long. Prayers up for the parents traveling with young kids. Happy Friday.
Manger Les Riches
by William Kristol
It’s the best of times for Elon Musk. It’s not the best of times for many of his fellow Americans.
Yesterday, Tesla announced shareholders had approved a plan from its board of directors to make the world’s richest man—currently in possession of about $500 billion—richer still. Musk will receive shares worth almost $1 trillion over the next decade if the company achieves various financial and operational goals.
The median Tesla worker earned about $57,000 in 2024, according to a company securities filing. The company announced no incentives package for the workers.
Musk has had a busy year, not confining his attention to Tesla. He had a stint in Donald Trump’s White House, as you might recall, where he spearheaded the administration’s destruction of USAID. Musk boasted on February 3 on his social media platform, X, that “we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Hundreds of thousands of the poor and the sick in Africa have died as a result. One study estimated that 14 million people could die because of these cuts should they continue through 2030.
Musk also injected himself into Germany’s national elections, enthusiastically endorsing the neo-Nazi party, the Allianz für Deutschland. His attempt to feed the German pro-liberal democracy and pro-America parties into the wood chipper failed.
This is the man who now stands at the pinnacle of the American system of democratic capitalism, and who is now having bestowed upon him ever greater wealth and rewards.
Others aren’t faring as well.
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported on new data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a firm that tracks workplace hiring and firing in the United States. “Employers,” the newspaper wrote, “announced more than 153,000 job cuts last month, a 183 percent increase from the month before, marking the worst October for layoffs since 2003.” For 2025 as a whole, U.S. employers have so far announced 1.1 million layoffs—a level of job cuts comparable to those of 2008 and 2009 during the Great Recession.
The Post talked with a 52-year-old software developer in Houston, Scott Boggs, who lost his job in late September. “Since then, he’s had a few interviews but says it’s been much harder to find viable openings than the last time he was laid off, about 20 years ago. His most recent interview, on Wednesday morning, was a video call with an AI bot that lasted 12 minutes.”
So in Austin, Elon Musk is doing great, riding an AI investment wave to unimaginable wealth. A hundred and fifty miles away, in Houston, Scott Boggs is reduced to pleading for a job with an AI bot.
You don’t have to be a wild-eyed leftist to think all of this has a pre-French Revolution vibe. It feels like a “let them eat cake” moment—and that’s to say nothing about the Trumpist kleptocracy that competes every day for headlines with our Muskian plutocracy.
The Old Regime in France led to the Revolution of 1789. And that revolution in turn quickly produced the Reign of Terror. It was one of the architects of the Terror, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, president of the Paris Commune, who in a speech on October 14, 1793 famously cited the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”
I’ve found no evidence that the quotation from Rousseau is correct, any more than that the “let them eat cake” remark ascribed to Marie Antoinette was real. But it’s true in a broader sense that the smug complacency of “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” invited the harsh reaction of “Manger les riches.”
The current state of American capitalism isn’t sustainable. It doesn’t deserve to be sustained. And the best way to avoid an American version of “eat the rich” is to fix the current “let them eat cake” distortion of capitalism into which we’ve fallen.
One person who doesn’t begin to understand this is Elon Musk. His solution to income inequality, he said yesterday, was for people to buy humanoid robots—specifically the one he’s developing. “People often talk about eliminating poverty, giving everyone amazing medical care. Well, there’s actually only one way to do that, and that’s with the Optimus robot,” he proclaimed, according to the New York Times. How convenient.
One man who does seem to grasp the character of the current moment is Pope Leo XIV. In an interview in September, Pope Leo cited Elon Musk’s pay package in the course of arguing that “we’re in big trouble” when it comes to the “continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive.” More recently, he commented on “the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people.” We might take guidance from the first American pope.
We might also take guidance from American leaders from the last century, like Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. They understood that the best way to avoid an American version of “eat the rich” was to fix the “let them eat cake” distortions of capitalism. We would greatly benefit from successors to the two Roosevelts today.
Modern-Day Hero
by Andrew Egger
Poor Jeanine Pirro. Donald Trump’s Fox News-honed U.S. attorney for D.C. wanted so badly to make an example of Sean Dunn, the man who whipped a sub sandwich into a Border Patrol agent’s bulletproof vest—“at point-blank range,” as the government argued in court—back in August.
Dunn was supposed to be the owned lib par excellence, the D.C. Democrat whose scalp they could hold up to the cheering MAGA throng as proof that they’re not gonna get away with it anymore. He had thrown a footlong. They were throwing the law right back.
The government spared no expense in its quest to make an example of Dunn. When they put out a warrant for his arrest, they wouldn’t let him surrender quietly—they sent twenty armed officers to his apartment to arrest him in the dead of night, videographer in tow. The White House posted a souped-up sizzle reel of the footage to X with the caption “Nighttime Routine: Operation Make D.C. Safe Again.” Pirro herself taped a video after the arrest: “This guy thought it was funny—well, he doesn’t think it’s funny today, because we charged him with a felony,” she beamed. “So there—stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.”
But they ran into trouble quick. First, a grand jury declined to sign off on Pirro’s desired charge of felony assault. (The decision spawned a thousand indict-a-ham-sandwich jokes that were graver crimes than any offense Dunn committed.) The feds quickly regrouped, charging Dunn with a misdemeanor instead. But alas: no luck there either. Yesterday, after seven hours of deliberation, a D.C. jury acquitted Dunn. He’s a free man again—at least until the next time he bumps into federal agents outside a Subway.
We admit being a hair surprised at the acquittal, to be honest. People have been booked for assaulting officers for less than a hoagie to the chest. But you have to imagine jurors were struck by the incongruity of it all: prosecutors’ breathless invective about Dunn’s diabolical intent to injure one of Our Great Federal Cops on the one hand, that cop’s testimony about how the greatest harm he suffered was mustard on his uniform and some ribbing from his buddies on the other. As NBC’s Ryan J. Reilly noted:
Border Patrol Officer Greg Lairmore received two “gag gifts” related to the incident—a plush sandwich and a patch featuring a cartoon of Dunn throwing the sandwich with the words “Felony Footlong”—which the defense team argued showed this was not a serious event in his life.
To convict, the jury would need to have been convinced Dunn intended to inflict “bodily injury”; apparently correctly, they judged that all that had been hurt was the officer’s pride.
And, of course, Pirro’s. The whole thing is an intense embarrassment for the gang of clowns currently trying to run a Scared Straight operation on the entire American left. Oh, you think you’re funny? Let’s see how funny you think you are when you’re IN JAIL. But a jury has spoken: The whole thing, it turns out, is pretty funny after all.
AROUND THE BULWARK
How the Supreme Court Could Save Christmas… If Trump lets them. Be sure to read the debut edition of CATHERINE RAMPELL’s Bulwark newsletter, Receipts.1
My Father’s Flag and the Idea of America… Over decades, across continents, and through harrowing experiences, LAURENCE TRIBE’s family held on to this bit of cloth as a reminder of everything they believed in—and were running toward.
Kash Patel’s Private Jet Problem Is Even Worse Than It Looks… This dude can’t stop flying to Nashville, reports WILL SOMMER in False Flag.
Milkshakes and Media… In The Triad, JVL on where The Bulwark is going.
Republicans Are in Denial About Tuesday… What happens when your party gets killed in an election but you can’t admit that anything is actually wrong? JOE PERTICONE shares this dispatch in Press Pass.
The Founders Would Abhor Trump’s Domestic Deployments… And the notion that courts can’t review his National Guard decisions is baseless, argues PHILIP ALLEN LACOVARA.
The Tories’ Dangerous Drift… A shocking proposal to deport 4 to 7 percent of the legal population of the U.K. signals darker things to come, argues TOBY BUCKLE.
Quick Hits
SNAP IN STASIS: The White House is appealing a judge’s order, handed down yesterday in Rhode Island, that it must find money somewhere to fully fund SNAP benefits for November by the end of the week. Judge John McConnell Jr. slapped down the administration’s plan to fund only partial benefits, arguing that this approach would result in insurmountable logistical burdens on the state organizations that process and distribute SNAP benefits.
While Judge McConnell is correct that the partial-payout system was likely to cause major headaches and delays, the White House is arguably entitled to a little frustration here. The shutdown drags on, no money is going into SNAP, and the supplemental fund they were already ordered to tap to keep paying SNAP benefits contains only $5 billion—enough to keep the money moving just for a couple weeks. Nobody wants to see those benefits expire altogether, but there’s only so much money the administration can find through One Weird Trick–type bookkeeping until there’s a breakthrough in the congressional impasse.
But reasonable or not, that frustration seemingly has the White House falling back into bad habits: openly flirting with the idea of defying a court order. “In the midst of a shutdown, we can’t have a federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation,” Vice President JD Vance fumed to reporters yesterday. “The president and the entire administration are working on that, but we’re not going to do it under the orders of a federal judge. We’re going to do it according to what we think we have to do to comply with the law.”
I’m doing it because I want to, not because you tell me to! Whatever you say, JD—provided you do actually do it.
THE STRIKES CONTINUE: Last week, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether he would call on Congress to legitimize his attacks on boats off the coast of Venezuela. “I don’t think we’re going necessarily to ask for a declaration of war,” Trump replied. “I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, okay? We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.”
Yesterday, the Senate said: Okay, sir, sounds good to us. The body voted down a resolution that would have required the White House to get congressional approval for any military action against Venezuela. The vote failed 49–51, with two Republicans—Sens. Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski—joining the Democrats who were united in support of the measure.
Some Republicans voted to allow the strikes to continue even as they denounced their use. Sen. Todd Young said in a statement that he was satisfied the strikes were legal, but added: “I am troubled by many aspects and assumptions of this operation and believe it is at odds with the majority of Americans who want the U.S. military less entangled in foreign conflicts.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is plainly taking such concerns under advisement. Shortly after the vote, he announced that the government had carried out yet another strike on yet another vessel in the Caribbean. “As we’ve said before, vessel strikes on narco-terrorists will continue until their the poisoning [sic] of the American people stops,” Hegseth tweeted.
NO GAMBLING IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT: The Supreme Court seemed to turn a frosty eye this week toward Donald Trump’s claims of sweeping authority to set tariff rates, with Justice Neil Gorsuch in particular raising questions about the massive assertion of executive power implicit in those claims. “Congress, as a practical matter, can’t get this power back once it’s handed it over to the president,” Gorsuch said. “It’s a one-way ratchet toward the gradual-but-continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the people’s elected representatives.”
At least one of those elected representatives took issue with that. “I don’t find myself in disagreement with Justice Gorsuch too often, but I think he’s missed the mark on this one,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters yesterday, poker face admirably smooth. “If I felt like the executive branch had overstepped its bounds on trade or on tariffs or something, I would have stepped in.”
Sure, Mike.
This is a speaker who has literally spearheaded strategic House measures to forbid Congress from taking votes related to Trump’s tariffs for months at a time. But we’re sure Johnson will be quick to chastise the president should he ever overstep Congress’s authority in any other domain.
Cheap Shots
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1) Colonel Mustard,
2) In the Dining Room,
3) With the Sandwich.
It is unsustainable. Thank you for saying that Bill. Being a billionaire is gross, but being a trillionaire is truly unconscionable. People LITERALLY cannot eat right now, and the Elon Musks of the world are laughing all the way to the bank.
It’s why the Democrats must focus on changing the system so that it actually works for THE PEOPLE.
If you took away 99% of the money from a billionaire they would still be a millionaire and depending on how many billions they have, they’d possibly STILL be a billionaire.
If you took away 99% of the money from any of the rest of us, we’d be unable to eat or have housing.
It’s that simple.